


The Founder Of Modern Women's Gymnastics

by chaoticrandomness



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, Gymnastics, Introspection, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-07-10 18:13:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6999121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaoticrandomness/pseuds/chaoticrandomness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Belarus watches the Munich Olympics, and witnesses the beginning of modern women's gymnastics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Founder Of Modern Women's Gymnastics

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VampirePaladin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VampirePaladin/gifts).



> This was inspired by the Olympics coming up, my enjoyment of women's artistic gymnastics, and seeing somewhere that Belarus is a gymnastics fan. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy your gift.

She doesn’t know what force has brought her to Munich, or why she’s even sitting in the stands of a gymnastics competition.

 

_It’s… in all honestly, it’s incredibly uninteresting._

 

Her siblings disagree with her, and she knows that she should be thinking in the same way as her brother, but what’s the point of creating multiple apparatuses if the only thing anyone does is elegantly pose?

 

_They could fly._

 

_Have they ever thought of jumping off the bars and seeing the world from above?_

 

Around her, the audience gasps, pulling her out of her ponderings. She looks away from the latticed speaker that’s caught her eye over the boring gymnasts, and gasps along with the crowd.

 

In the middle of the arena is a tiny girl in white with pigtails that’s performing an uneven bars routine. She stands on top of the high bar, as if waiting for someone to knock her down and tell her that she’s not performing the way she’s supposed to.

 

And then she jumps off the top of the bar, and flies.

 

* * *

 

_Who was that girl?!_

 

_I know her, don’t I? She’s Belorussian, isn’t she?_

 

“Did you see the girl that everyone’s talking about, Natalia?” her brother asks as they walk towards the village.

 

“Who is she?!” she exclaims, yet she knows that the girl has been ill before the competition, and is the youngest one on the Soviet Union’s team.

 

_No one ever pays attention to the youngest sibling, or the youngest girl in a group, yet they are the ones who storm in out of nowhere and capture everyone’s attention._

 

Her brother mistakenly assumes that she missed the entire team gymnastics event, and goes on to talk about a seventeen-year-old girl named Olga Korbut who somehow ended up stealing the attention from Ludmilla Tourischeva, despite the latter’s maturity and calmness.

 

_It’s because she can fly._

 

_Have you ever wanted to just run away from everything, jump off a roof, and see how far you would go? She is the closest we can get to escaping our lives, and achieving freedom._

 

* * *

 

She spends the next few days sitting in the stands, waiting for the routines of a sparrow-like girl.

 

_This is what gymnastics should be. A chance for all of us to fly._

 

Energy surges through her veins during the entire rest of the event, as her people watch a girl from Minsk capture the hearts of the world. The world loves her as well, and watches her every routine with baited breath.

 

_See, brother, this is the sort of girl who’ll win over the world. One filled with charisma and power along with grace, instead of grace and nothing else._

 

_They are not mutually exclusive._

 

Korbut falls on her bar mount three times and comes back from that mistake with a pair of near-perfect routines and gets heinously underscored in the uneven bars final, and she lets her emotions rise and fall with those of the audience.

 

_If you are a judge, and you see the future in front of you with your own two eyes, shouldn’t you reward it instead of encouraging the past?_

 

_I won’t attack you, don’t worry. But I do have knives._

 

* * *

 

“What’s gotten into you, Natalia?” her brother asks her the first day she doesn’t watch anything.

 

_Of course, you, being a concerned elder brother, are wondering why I spent all that time inside an arena staring at something that used to bore me._

 

“I have been witnessing the birth of modern gymnastics.” she answers. He seems satisfied with her answer, and thus departs to watch something else, leaving her alone with her thoughts and knives.

 

_In the future, you will thank her for bringing life to this sport._

 

“...I’m sorry for… have we met before?” a girl says as she almost crashes into her. She looks away from the clouds, and into the eyes of the girl who’s spent the past few days creating a one-woman seismic shift in women’s gymnastics.

 

“Thank you.” she answers, before leaving the girl alone and wondering if she’ll ever figure out who she was speaking to.

  
  



End file.
